Math and Spawn Rates

[Tanthallas]

Originally Posted by Snagglepuss [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

This way, your actions that have positive expected value will pay off over time...

This is highly misleading. The conditions that have to be met in order to calculate the probability of events in terms expected value are extremely unrealistic and in most cases make the calculation itself moot.

Best way to think about it is like Sirken said. It doesnt give you a practical answer because there is no practical answer.

[Snagglepuss]

Originally Posted by Tanthallas [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

This is highly misleading. The conditions that have to be met in order to calculate the probability of events in terms expected value are extremely unrealistic and in most cases make the calculation itself moot.

Best way to think about it is like Sirken said. It doesnt give you a practical answer because there is no practical answer.

Well, that was an anecdotal reference to an infinite poker game / casino game where you could calculate expected value. I was using it as a "lede" to discussing the concept of gambler's fallacy or independent outcomes. The idea that we've all been at a camp and said to ourselves,

"It's gotta spawn; I've been here so long. Just one more round... I'll set the alarm a little later in the morning...".

Once on a cruise ship, I observed a roulette wheel show black 15 times in a row. Man, you should have seen the looks on some of those poor gambler's faces!

It's fascinating how sunken costs play a huge role in our decisions. "I've already been at this camp for 6 hours! What's another 5! i'm not leaving until it's mine!"

[Splorf22]

Originally Posted by Tanthallas [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

This is highly misleading. The conditions that have to be met in order to calculate the probability of events in terms expected value are extremely unrealistic and in most cases make the calculation itself moot.

Best way to think about it is like Sirken said. It doesnt give you a practical answer because there is no practical answer.

You must be an undergraduate. I'm not sure whether you just dismissed the entire discipline of statistics with an airy wave of your fraternal hand or whether you have never heard of machine learning. There are computer poker players that use precisely this concept to play poker. Obviously you cannot know for sure what your opponent will do when you checkraise him on the turn, which is why you can estimate it from training data using any number of techniques.

[zanderklocke]

Game of luck, EverQuest is. Sure, it helps to know people who can get you into camps like Fungi, but all drops and spawns are at the mercy of the random number generator. The only thing that is for certain is that not trying a camp/mob at all will always yield no results.

[Sirken]

btw, your poker analogy is good, but doesnt apply because you are removing cards from the deck, hence every round your odds of drawing to that flush change for better or worse depending on the previous card or cards put out (depending which game ur playing).

a closer analogy would be blackjack, but with a brand new deck for each hand.

each pop (be it ph or the rare mob) is a completely separate encounter, and what pops has absolutely 0% to do with what popped before that.

not trying to be a dick, just explaining [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Estu]

Yeah, you guys talking about faulty RNGs have a point, but so does Sirken. Someone early in the thread talked about how people don't think random numbers are as streaky as they actually are. To illustrate this, let me tell a short story.

I once took a probability course and the professor divided the class into two halves - he told one half to flip a coin and write down a string of 100 ones and zeroes for the heads and tails flips, and he told the other half to try and think of 100 random ones and zeroes in a row. He told us he'd leave the room, and to have one half of the class write their string of ones and zeroes on one side of the board, and the other half of the class on the other side. When he came back to the room, he'd have to guess which half was 'truly' random (the literal coin-flippers) and which half was trying to come up with random numbers.

He left the room, we wrote up the numbers, and we called him back in. He looked at the board for a couple of seconds and correctly pointed out the truly random numbers. How did he know? They had longer streaks. The coin-flippers had streaks of 7 or 8 zeroes or ones in a row, while the people who tried to think up random numbers never had a streak longer than, say, 5 zeroes or ones.

OK, so what's the point of the story? The point is we humans have a poor intuitive understanding of random numbers. We play EverQuest or whatever game and we see a long streak and we think, "Shit, this game's out to get me. It's not truly random, there's a bug in the code or it was done intentionally to screw with people." But we're INCLINED to think that because we intuitively believe that random numbers are less streaky than they can be mathematically shown to be.

The point is we can't rely on intuition to make these judgments. We need to take raw data and make statistical analyses, like was done in this thread. Yeah, if the skeleton has a 5% spawn rate then the probability of a guy going 270 spawns without a pop is one in a million. My personal conclusion to that story is that the wiki has something wrong in the spawn rate or the placeholder information (which is EXTREMELY common since the wiki has various sources, whether it be newer code from the game (e.g. maybe the spawn rate was increased in a later patch to make it less of a pain, which is the info the wiki is using, but in P99 it's the low original rate), hearsay (someone read something on an old allakhazam post or heard something from a random guildie), or straight-up speculation), so the wiki is giving the wrong probability or the guy trying to get the spawn is doing it the wrong way.

But if we're looking at anecdotal things without actual probabilities and data, NO WAY are we qualified to make judgments about the RNG and its streakiness based on our intuition. Which is what some people are doing later in this thread, and where I agree with Sirken and his tin foil hat image.

[Lagaidh]

Originally Posted by Estu [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Phil Spector's Wall of Text

I agree with you whole heartedly. Like I said of myself, I didn't have the will to truly analyze what I was perceiving.

Even as I type now, I know I've put in enough time at a camp that I begin to let "instinct" tell me something is different before and after a patch. Too bad instinct is a tool to keep us alive and feeling justified in decision making.

It's sort of amazing... on one hand, I'm a human that understands the staggering improbability of Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, but on the other hand, I "kinda" listen when my gut is telling me that the RNG is a bit "too" streaky.

We really are still an infant species aren't we? I know better, but my biochemical programming likes to interject lies...

Man. I'd better start smoking pot again if I'm going to get all metaphysical over a RNG discussion.

[rahmani]

Originally Posted by Sirken [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

btw, your poker analogy is good, but doesnt apply because you are removing cards from the deck, hence every round your odds of drawing to that flush change for better or worse depending on the previous card or cards put out (depending which game ur playing).

a closer analogy would be blackjack, but with a brand new deck for each hand.

each pop (be it ph or the rare mob) is a completely separate encounter, and what pops has absolutely 0% to do with what popped before that.

not trying to be a dick, just explaining [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Just a side note on the Gambler's Fallacy.

Gambler's Fallacy is only the wrong assumption that any individual random event is influenced by the previous random events.

However, it is true that over long periods of time and large values of n the binomial distribution will approach the probability of the possible outcomes. This is in fact how probabilities are deduced.

It is correct to say that it is increasingly improbable for the set of n observations to deviate significantly from the distribution as n increases.

So, if there is a probability of 5% (p=0.05) of an event producing a 1, and all other times (p=0.95) will produce a 0, then at n=1,000,000 you will have a distribution that is very close to the probability. In other words, if you don't have very close to 50,000 1s, something is seriously broken.

* Binomial Distribution
* Law of Large Numbers
* Gambler's Fallacy

[rahmani]

Also, no computers generate truly random numbers, which is a real problem. Computers that generate the most random-acting numbers sense environmental changes caused by fluctuations in the atmosphere.

However, EverQuest like all games, uses a pseudo-random number generating algorithm, and must, by definition, fail at the serial randomness test, which compares all identical lengths of digits and weighs them against other sequences of the same length.

Go to Random.ORG, a site dedicated to presenting with the most seemingly random numbers. The numbers are not determined by a set algorithm, instead they are sensed.

In the following sequence, for any string length, L there should be an identical number of occurrences as the total number of digits approaches infinity. And as the digit length increases by 1, the digits should be ten times less frequent.

Sample of single digits:
0:205x, 1:207x , 2:214x, 7:199x, 9:189x

Sample of double digits:
00:19x, 01:20x, 69:26x, 99:17x

The sample size of triple digits is small, although they do exhibit some of the same random properties.

Sample of triple digits:
100:4x, 999:1x, 434:2x, 901:1x



60801468158158128265500664544694727122124230258075 89571133284564798639346318666510097025111188884005 21923075241160765601985943448956025269830536604941 99504230101058822671207931152613178877543677697509 02706771661102759463379639530443615657163698062759 06337782166957101973173212845041749226483640829555 86423040123454106792574561123269430351901285071917 86620163674835453275555190813444328411810157776825 13234587722475732237420540620556244139615521226905 81598019524566660334579294592358173180858402456420 60342278560260571770605545673269139285436949040963 30631986605922117878478030732571918682208101686355 29768144509889511043749779223728743822621155920732 36368577581258703118950979428887523049210023168408 37427100135119107190534513416545895979251093257271 79042017501900644993469774830551072737674466300623 59739756943917079386634900082442716979766978266522 45471379075300444617560397168250547024130633105838 51880321514936357619795116325315994695612797571243 98436734812197672492480992432227236861653412859863 21364291004588255654211046475385828878867224992808 14151174625825430174357532675458656989750344694063 15091271709802352516436199242258530307756137327440 15705758761765938234998973921542774665875715631334 76368242047502643509555881716221668548280049122183 81667194126560994767831904541927309933743864620394 51851359628452986890550026423125255750838304060402 77216336873695117866982789903107180513800797868540 43313265047972927614346809614367102894172556879749 52825882627033025084021055514790494200502341827015 10966860314288573746489647976518028880180564128814 81050576929140396109697527053447366369392520319779 99590609037699619266954394131024058087880493199574 80381552872508846866412026033903449269278810722898 17264966881768923809416025761438974757512589601200 62056044130156627607563524672328072411751402038849 28602825848721207866700913852009939022369127335074 95818145156261571036972631389596368739085531394331 28376550816382510244987659629574966734292129941784 23792086413272992712103998674454880545579600500516

Try the same test on ANY pseudorandom algorithm, it'll fail.

[Estu]

Originally Posted by rahmani [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Try the same test on ANY pseudorandom algorithm, it'll fail.

Without actually having a program to test it, I don't believe this statement. Just because you have a pseudorandom generator doesn't mean it can't produce uniform numbers in the sense you described. You can do something as simple as expand pi or the square root of two to get digits between 0 and 9, and it will satisfy your test.